If multiculturalism is being re-examined in Canada today, it’s due in no small part to its supposed beneficiaries, immigrants. They have as many reservations about Canada’s official policy as the host population, and are less reluctant to express them. I’ve been fuming about multiculturalism for decades — but fuming about things too soon is like trying to pluck unripe fruit.

Now the fruit is beginning to ripen.

Immigrants who question multiculturalism range from a Korean lady I know in her 70s, whose English is still marginal after 40 years, to learned scholars such as Salim Mansur, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario, whose latest book, Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism has just hit the bookstores.

To understand why Professor Mansur, a Muslim who came here from Bangladesh more than 30 years ago, considers multiculturalism a “delectable lie,” it’s sufficient to read his book, but the Korean lady’s reservations require interpretation. Her idea of what was “Canadian” came from meeting some Canadian soldiers as a child during the Korean War. Her dream was to live among them, and she eventually realized it. When the ethnic composition of her Toronto neighbourhood started changing, she felt cheated.

“What happened to all the nice white people who used to live here?” she asked my wife plaintively one day.

My wife, also of Korean extraction, wondered herself. “Yes, what did happen to those nice WASPy people?” she asked me. “Did multiculturalism get them?”

Well, a component of multiculturalism did. Ethnic engineering.

In the 1960s, inspired by the spirit of the times, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his merry band of sorcerer’s apprentices, embarked on what seemed to them a jolly social experiment. It entailed altering this country’s ethno-cultural makeup, along with its institutions and ethos.

Canada’s brave new progressive-liberal-socialist mandarins devised on a three-step program to revamp the country culturally and demographically. It involved (a) reducing immigration from “traditional’ (read: West European) sources; (b) increasing it from non-traditional sources, and (c) dismantling Conservative Prime Minister (till 1963) John Diefenbaker’s ideal society of unhyphenated Canadians and replacing it with Trudeaucratic Liberalism’s ideal of a multicultural Canada.

Ostensibly, multiculturalism was built on an earlier Canadian tradition, called “cultural mosaic.” In contrast to the American “melting pot,” with its gung-ho patriotism and crude pressures of assimilation, the cultural mosaic seemed a more elegant model of nationhood. It produced a richer royal tapestry for the Crown in Canada, some said, than America’s republican monochrome. In reality, the concept of a mosaic had less to do with elegance than with the founding nations’ snobbery: The reluctance of the British and French to share the country with the riff-raff of the world on a completely equal footing. The “cultural mosaic” carried a hint of apartheid to ensure the dominant position of the founding groups.

Multiculturalists liked the mosaic, but not its patterns and hues. Going beyond the British and the French, ethnic engineers aimed at changing the European character of Canada. Though the immediate benefit of multiculturalism was that the din of many distinct cultures clamouring for attention would drown the noise of Quebec’s demands for cultural distinction, Trudeau’s ambitious, unannounced, and probably unexamined design was to take the country out of the ambit of Christendom within two or three generations altogether, and make it the vanguard of the Third World in the Western Hemisphere.

I’m not aware of Trudeau setting this out anywhere, but if it wasn’t his plan, God alone knows what he thought the natural consequences of his policies would be. As it turned out, the first consequence was a notion that Canada isn’t really an entity with its own culture but a political framework for a multitude of co-existing cultures, followed by a retreat from the principle that immigration should always serve the interests of the host country first. This encouraged and rewarded a new type of immigrant, who was no longer a settler, here to fit in, prosper, and put down roots; a refugee, trying to weather a storm; or even an enterprising gold digger making his fortune before returning home. No: The new type was a conqueror whose quest was to alter Canada to suit him and his tribe.

I don’t think Trudeau and his acolytes meant to contribute to alienation, dissension and terror in the world. It would surprise me if Canada’s pirouetting bon vivant leader envisaged the 21st century to be ushered in by disaffected Muslims shooting Dutch politicians, crashing airliners into Manhattan skyscrapers, and blowing themselves up in London buses and Madrid trains. Trudeau & Co. pursued their policies because, while stumbling about in the mist of the 1960s, aggravated by what Tom Wolfe called a “quasi-Marxist fog,” they came to believe that the ills of the planet were due to Western ways, and the sooner they could replace the crumbling edifice with a New Left Utopia, the better.

Multiculturalism’s hyphen, meant to be a bridge, is in fact a ditch between whatever it’s supposed to link to “Canadian.” It’s dysfunctional, like so many ideas from the 1960s. A pity that it’s often confused with its good twin, diversity.

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